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“I don’t think you’ll find many brands that can give you a full view of every touch point of the consumer in general,” says Raj Koneru, serial entrepeneur and most recently CEO of Kore, a bots and messaging player for the enterprise sector. But he points out that there’s a specific weak spot in your cross-channel analytics that’s throwing your marketing budget more out of whack than most marketers realize.

“There are really only four channels that marketers are concerned about: the brick and mortar stores, online commerce, mobile commerce, and social media,” Koneru says. “Consumers touch the brand both for shopping purposes and customer services purposes — but most cross channel analytics have been relegated to the conversion aspect rather than the customer service aspect.”

And that’s a major blind spot for marketers, Koneru says. “Customer service directly relates to customer satisfaction,” he explains. “It’s a direct reflection of the brand, much more than the product or service that was sold to the consumer. The ability to service a customer will create a repeat customer.”

The number of times the consumer called your call center, or emailed you, or went on a live chat session to interact with you, is generally lost in the equation, he says, so marketing folks generally don’t have that information to rely on. “They’ve lost valuable insight into the sentiment of the consumer toward the brand, which is primarily derived from post-sale activity as opposed to pre-sale activity,” he says.

It’s a major data hole that reflects the overall challenge of accurate cross-channel analytics strategies: accurate, in-depth attribution in channels where data tends to be solidly siloed and unintegrated.

“Marketers are trying to overlay that with some kind of analytical engine or platform that can pull all of that information and apply it to the same individual,” Koneru says. “It’s almost an impossible problem to solve, in some ways, given how each of these channels have been implemented in most cases.”

Not to mention that most of the data that actually comes back from the channels that marketers monitor is inauthenticated, making attribution impossible and offering only cookie-level data.

“Identity systems are plentiful in most of these enterprises, and tying the identity of the user or the consumer from one system to another is a massive, massive problem,” Koneru explains. “And most people don’t tackle that problem. They take data from one channel and do the analytics on that, and build marketing campaigns on the basis of that. And the result that you get is not as optimal as you would want.”

It’s one of the reasons Koneru believes that bots shouldn’t just be a a nice-to-have as their capabilities evolve.

“Bots are going to be an important part of the landscape as time goes on,” Koneru says. “And if that is the primary channel your consumer is going to use to communicate with you, you’re able to determine a lot more from that channel than any other channel, or all of the other channels combined.”

What does it take to create a holistic view—and how do you integrate all of your most valuable data into the analytics stream? Join this VB Live event to learn more.